Since the Latin American debt crisis of the early 80s, country risk analysis has accounted for a significant part of the work of research and risk management departments of banks, insurance companies, rating agencies, financial market regulators, and multinational companies. Country risk is a...

This paper has been prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). It seeks to give an overview of the Spanish economy’s experience in this new institutional setting. It should be viewed as the result of a joint effort by a sizeable group of researchers from the...

The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has raised interest in early warning indicators, aimed at signalling the build-up of fiscal stress in advance and helping prevent crises by means of a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible improvements...

Maravall and del Río (2001), analized the time aggregation properties of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, which decomposes a time series into trend and cycle, for the case of annual, quarterly, and monthly data, and showed that aggregation of the disaggregate component cannot be obtained as...

The Chinese banking system, characterized by massive government intervention, poor asset quality and low capitalization, has started a reform process based on three main pillars: (i) bank restructuring, through the cleaning-up of non-performing loans and public capital injections, particularly...

This paper reviews the existing empirical evidence on the short term impact on prices of fiscal variables and assesses it against new results from harmonised simulations, conducted with six well established econometric models used by the ECB and five national central banks (NCBs) of the...